Analysis
Success
of far-right AfD shows east and west Germany are drifting further apart
Philip
Oltermann
European
culture editor
Likely win
in Thuringia and second place in Saxony highlight how eastern voters are
asserting their own political identity
German
far-right party AfD poised for state election victory in east
Sun 1 Sep
2024 20.17 CEST
After the
Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the former West German chancellor Willy
Brandt predicted that reunification would finally allow “what belongs together
to grow together”.
How
optimistic that image of organic healing sounds 35 years on. Tonight’s historic
election results from Thuringia and Saxony paint a picture of a Germany whose
eastern and western regions are, if anything, drifting further and further
apart.
The
far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is riding a
populist wave across Europe’s largest economy. If federal elections were held
tomorrow, recent polls suggest the party could become the second strongest
group in the Bundestag.
But only in
the eastern states can the AfD claim to have a mandate to form the next
government, as its Thuringian leader, Björn Höcke, has already done after
emerging top in a state election for the first time ever, on at least 30% of
the vote.
And in none
of the western states do polls predict that the far right would challenge the
established parties of the centre right and centre left as seriously as in
Saxony, where projections have the AfD in a head-to-head race with the
conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), with the latter slightly ahead
in exit polls.
In
Brandenburg, the state that surrounds the capital, Berlin, the AfD is also
expected to emerge as the strongest party later this month.
As long as
the remaining parties manage to uphold the cordon sanitaire around the far
right and prevent it from gaining a majority, its dreams of seizing power will
probably remain merely aspirational. Nonetheless, the AfD’s establishment as a
dominant regional force raises serious and troubling questions about Germany’s
political identity and how it contain the rise of such forces in the future.
For years,
the assumption in Germany has been that once the eastern states had “caught up”
with the rest of the country economically, their political outlook would align.
According to such reasoning, the rise of the AfD is cast as a protest vote
against continued disparities in income, employment and living standards.
But
economics and demographics only go so far to explain the outcome of Sunday’s
votes. The population of the east is older than that in the west, but it is no
longer demographically “bleeding out” as it was during the last years of the
German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the two decades that followed. In fact,
every year since 2017, more people have migrated from the west to the east.
Unemployment
is higher, but only by a fraction – the real contrast here is between northern
and southern Germany. For the last two years, the economies of the eastern
states have been growing faster than those in the west, as global players such
as Tesla and Intel have set up factories in the eastern lands. Levels of
immigration in the eastern states that went to the polls on Sunday night are
among the lowest in the whole of Germany.
According to
a survey published by Olaf Scholz’s government at the start of this year, about
19% of east Germans say they feel left behind. That is twice as many as in the
west (8%), but would still suggest that 80% of the population of the five
eastern states do not feel they are losing out. Yet a sizeable number of them
cast their votes for a party that, in its Thuringian branch, has been certified
as rightwing extremist.
The
eastern-born sociologist Steffen Mau has coined the term ossifikation for this
trend – a play on the slang term for former GDR citizens and the biological
process by which tissue hardens into bone. Far from still “catching up”, Mau
writes in his recent book Ungleich Vereint (Unequally Unified), east Germany is
voting differently from the west precisely because it has already caught up and
now claims the right to assert its own distinct identity.
In her book
Tausend Aufbrüche (A Thousand Starts), which won this year’s top German
nonfiction prize, the GDR-born historian Christina Morina says the AfD is
winning in the east because it has managed to tap into a distinctive
understanding of what democracy entails, which was shaped by 40 years under
communist rule and remains different from that in the west.
This might
sound paradoxical, since the GDR was a single-party dictatorship without free
elections and no division of state powers. Yet the GDR’s regime claimed the
concept of democracy for its own purposes, and emphatically so.
“East
Germany too claimed for itself to have found a democratic response to national
socialism,” Morina told the Guardian in a recent interview. “It’s just that the
communists’ story of how democracy worked was a deeply populist one, which
claimed to be truer and more representative of real people than democracy in
the west, which they said was merely organising class hierarchies and
representing the interests of capitalism.”
The historic
experience of that kind of pseudo-democracy, she argued, was one explanation
for why the AfD was managing to mobilise so many more previous non-voters in
the east than other parties.
Unlike the
established centrist parties, the AfD has not only held rallies on the campaign
trail, but organised spaziergänge, “strolls” through town centres, which are
designed to evoke the peaceful Monday protests that accompanied the unravelling
of socialist East Germany. It is the only party in Germany that calls for the
president to be directly elected by citizens rather than through a federal
convention, and has advocated for a Swiss-style direct democracy of regular
referendums.
“In its
election campaigns, the AfD very effectively tapped into an experience that is
widely shared among east Germans,” said Morina. “That you don’t make yourself
heard through voting, by engaging yourself in political parties, civic groups
or unions, but by mobilising the masses for street protests.”
There is
every reason to distrust the AfD’s claim to merely represent a different
democratic tradition. Underlying its story of empowerment lies a deeply racist
strand of thinking, which casts easterners as more pure Germans because they
resisted multiculturalism and all the ideas that entered the West German
discourse after the student revolutions of 1968.
But both Mau
and Morina suggest that winning back voters from the far right can only work by
engaging them directly through unconventional and creative means, such as local
citizens’ assemblies. To halt and eventually reverse the drifting apart of
Germany’s east and west, the political centre needs to start thinking outside
the box.
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